In an (unfortunately) familiar trend, our case study domain’s November 2022 ad revenues continue their downward descent. Over the past month, we recorded display ad earnings of $14,319. If you’re not a bit familiar with what’s been going on recently, that handy Revenue Reports tab up there might prove helpful in offering you some insight. TL;DR, the declines have been going on for a few months now.
Specifically, right around August and September 2022. From August’s high of $18,476 to September’s $17,963, ad earnings persisted its drop to $15,155 in October 2022. So, what’s caused this? Well, one of the leading factors, as we noted in last month’s report, is significant updates to Google Search’s core algorithms. It’s caused our case study domain to not be as prioritized in the search rankings.
This has, as a direct result, led to lower site traffic, and thus, lower ad revenues, too. In particular, we can see here that our case study domain, across all of November 2022, documents lower traffic across the board… Nearly 351,000 page visits, over 431,000 pageviews, and about 238,000 of them classed as engaged pageviews. All 3 figures of which are roughly 6.00% to 6.50% declines from October 2022.
On the bright side, at least our case study domain’s EPMVs (earnings per thousand visitors) are up by 4.50% compared to October, averaging at $40.92. With that in mind, it should also be noted that our case study domain is monetized using Ezoic. As we’re a part of its Premium program, this also means that $14,319 isn’t the final tally just yet. Since, we do have to deduct those premium fees from it.
| November 2022 Ad Revenue From Ezoic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (Total) | $14,319 | |
| Traffic | Visits | 350,986 |
| Pageviews | 431,359 | |
| Engaged Pageviews | 238,321 | |
| ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) | $40.92 | |
Key Figures
To be a Premium member, we’ll need to pay Ezoic $2,200 upfront at the start of every month – not the most ideal solution, but it is what it is. Still, at least it’s a no-lose situation, as they basically guarantee that you’ll always be earning more than what you’re paying to them. In this case, Ezoic’s Premium ads contributed around $3,557. Meanwhile, Ezoic’s normal advertisers netted us another $9,974.
Plus, we’re also relying on Ezoic’s clever mediation tool, allowing us to monetize alongside a different ad network provider. That’ll add another $823 onto the pile – don’t mind the slight variations in those sums, as we’re using two separate data analytics tools. As you could see in that green graph detailing the breakdown of our earnings, you might’ve noticed a huge dip right around late November.
This dip is owed to Black Friday, which in the instance of our case study domain that primarily focuses on instructional SEO-focused long-form blog-style articles, didn’t really translate to any jump in traffic. If anything, most readers were probably busy shopping instead of reading, which is understandable. A keen eye will note that this single dip alone can’t account for such a noticeable ad revenue drop.
To better understand what’s going on, Ezoic has its Ad Revenue Index, showcasing its daily ad rates for all publishers monetizing through them. As you may notice in this chart, 2022 as a whole has been rather flat as far as ad revenue growth is concerned. It pales in comparison to the huge spike that we saw in 2021 – mostly around November and December. Normally, it should be higher than this.
Looking At The Data
Therefore, there’s one major question that’s left unanswered… Why is this the case, and why haven’t we seen continual, steady growth? Well, for one thing, on a more macroeconomic scale, the markets as they are now have been performing fairly poorly. Without enough cash flowing around, advertisers aren’t as likely to budget nearly as much of their narrowing surpluses into online display ads.
As such, with these big companies slowing down their advertising game, publishers will be left with a declining (and flatlining) ad revenue projection. This is among the major reasons why our EPMVs and CPMs aren’t as rosy this year. Especially, over the past few months. This is further exacerbated by the fact that it’s now tougher for us to rank competitively with Google’s updated search algorithms.
Another example that we could share is our daily ad revenues. The highest-earning day in November brought in nearly $600. Meanwhile, most other days averaged in the low to mid-$500s. We also saw some days where we only earned in the low to mid-$400s. It’s already lower than October 2022, and this is relatively meager to those times just a few months ago when we’d earn $800+ in 24 hours.
The best that we can do now is hope that continuous changes in Google’s search engine will even out in good time. Maybe then, we’ll get our case study domain back on Google’s good side, enabling us to rank competitively once more, and for more pages to show up on those Page 1 results. As you can see in this year-on-year graph, 2022’s late-year (mostly Q4) traffic has been dropping fast.
Our Future Plans
Regardless of how gloomy this might seem, there’s still hope for good times to come yet. For example, the case study domain is still rocking over 200++% gains in page visits, pageviews, as well as engaged pageviews between 2022 and 2021. This is very telling that we’re still on the right track. And all things considered, traffic and ad revenues, despite the setback, are still fairly good throughout November.
We can’t overlook how the pageviews grew from around 1.6 million in 2021 to about 5.5 million this year. We’ve also been at work diversifying our income stream this year too, courtesy of Ezoic. We had been slowly putting up more videos on Ezoic’s video hosting platform, Humix. It’s their equivalent and alternative to YouTube, basically. With that, we’ve been earning around $450 to $500 per month.
Not a whole lot by comparison, but every little penny helps, I’d say. Along similar lines, we’ve worked on our SEO, too. Not a lot of changes, but we’re mostly refining tiny processes here and there. It’s like tuning an engine or overclocking a GPU – little optimizations and tweaks to extract and eke out as much as we can. For now, our goal is to keep holding out, doing our best, and seeing how things go next year.
In the meantime, we also have a bunch of helpful resources on this site that you can refer to. If you’re just starting out, I’ve written a guide on how to make money by creating online content. In addition, a plethora of guides on keyword research and SEO optimization, as well as an Ask Me Anything section to ask away if you have a question. Also, there’s this video summary, if you’re interested…
